Fifty years later, Umberto Caldora’s lesson still speaks to Calabria. Not only as an academic legacy, but as a civil testimony of a generation that knew how to combine study, political passion and commitment to the redemption of the South. His name, engraved in the memory of Unical and in the toponymy of Castrovillari, returned to the center of a day of reflection promoted by the Municipality, Unical and numerous protagonists of Calabrian and national culture and socialism. It was November 6, 1975 when Caldora, then fifty-one years old, was struck down by a sudden illness in his maisonette on the Arcavacata campus. He had chosen to leave Naples to join the first group of teachers of the nascent University of Calabria, whose Faculty of Letters and Philosophy was taking its first steps under the guidance of pioneers such as Boris Ulianich and Antonio Guarasci (as recalled by Franco Bartucci, former historian responsible for the university’s press office). Professor of modern history, winner of a professorship, rigorous intellectual and man of clear militancy, Caldora embodied a period in which culture was, for many, the highest form of politics.
Castrovillarese by birth and Calabrian by vocation, he had traveled to the professorships of Chieti, Lecce, Bari and Naples before arriving in Arcavacata. But his academic trajectory was intertwined with a civil commitment that had led him to the direction of the Historical Institute for the Resistance in Campania and to collaboration with the Deputation of Homeland History for Calabria and Lucania. His research, oriented towards the South, made him a historian of the territory and its contradictions: a man who looked to the past to understand the roots of the present.
The memory signed by Piero Ardenti remains the most exact definition: «Eminent scholar, humane and understanding teacher… Calabria loses a passionate son in Umberto Caldora». After the death of Guarasci, his friend and fellow thinker, the University lost a second symbolic figure, an interpreter of the project of a university as an instrument of emancipation. On the fiftieth anniversary of his death, the new rector Gianluigi Greco recalled how «celebrating the figure of Caldora enriches the historical memory of Unical, updating its founding values». Words that find an echo in those of the mayor of Castrovillari, Mimmo Lo Polito: «He was among the few who believed that Calabria could have a real university, capable of training ruling classes and retaining its young people. His vision remains an example of intellectual courage.”
